Winter Guerra

Winter Guerra is a talented roboticist and systems engineer with a Masters of Engineering from MIT's renowned Sertac Karaman’s lab. With valuable experience and skills in high-speed, vision-based perception and planning for robotics, Guerra has become a prolific researcher and author. During her graduate studies, Guerra authored multiple peer-reviewed publications on vision-based navigation for autonomous vehicles. Her work had a significant impact on high-speed indoor flight using visual inertial odometry (VIO), active perception/SLAM, collision avoidance of dynamic actors via perception-aware planning, and photorealistic in-the-loop sensor simulation for robotics.

Guerra also developed a virtual reality system, FlightGoggles, to make testing high-speed perception, planning, and human-robot interaction in-the-loop feasible. FlightGoggles has been used extensively in a production setting, like the Lockheed Martin AlphaPilot AI Drone Racing Innovation Challenge, where she led the simulation phase. Guerra has hands-on experience in writing production code for robotic systems and working with multiple robotics courses at MIT as a teaching assistant.

Before joining MIT, Guerra researched LIDAR-based localization and online planning for autonomous cars and focused on text summarization using natural language processing. Before her current role as a Software Engineer II at SRI International, Guerra also worked at Akamai Technologies, Makerbot Industries, and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).